CA says it will focus on six core technology products

Computer Associates International plans to focus on six core technology and product areas going forward, CEO Sanjay Kumar said yesterday (Monday) in the US in an address to industry and financial analysts in New York. Those areas include security, storage, enterprise management, application development tools, and visualisation and knowledge management technologies.

CA will deliver a range of infrastructure, information and process management technologies around each of these focus areas, Kumar said.

His remarks reflect growing efforts by CA to rationalise its vast array of acquired products, said Valerie O'Connell, an analyst at Aberdeen Group.

By putting its various technologies into well-defined product and technology categories, CA hopes to make it easier, both internally and for enterprise customers, to understand the company's offerings, she said.

"It is a huge thing for CA to try and parse their offerings of products and services in such a way that customers can understand it and have a way to navigate through the offerings," O'Connell said. Kumar's remarks were "more than just words and less than something new."

The company has come under scrutiny in recent months for questions related to its accounting methods and allegations that it has obfuscated falling sales and exaggerated its real earnings.

Going forward, Kumar said CA's subscription-based software licensing and contract models, first announced last year, will continue to make it easier for customers to do business with the company. Clients can define the length and value of their agreements and will have the freedom to choose between short-term and long-term arrangements, based on their needs.

"We are absolutely not focused on driving our whole business month-to-month nor exclusively long-term," Kumar said. "The business will fall naturally wherever it has to fall," with CA offering whatever licensing flexibility is needed along the way.

CA will also increasingly build the same kind of flexibility when selling products, he said. The company's flagship Unicenter TNG suite, for instance, is already available in a highly modular fashion, and customers can buy only the pieces they need, adding new functionality later if they choose to do so.

Similar modularity will be built into the company's security, storage and other management technologies, he said.

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